In an era when saying the wrong thing, deemed offensive by someone, can end a career, social justice warriors always seem to get a pass. Few have received more than Linda Sarsour, a Muslim self-styled “feminist” who supports a political system that systematically represses women, celebrates child warriors on social media, and once tweeted of two ideological foes, “I wish I could take away their vaginas – they don’t deserve to be women.”

The more Sarsour offends, the more she is celebrated. Barack Obama honored her as a Champion of Change. Today she will give the keynote address at the City University of New York’s (CUNY) School of Public Health graduation ceremony.

Sarsour’s endorsement of sharia law and leadership in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement should have made her an unfit candidate to address graduates of any educational institution even if she weren’t a social media provocateur. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of the women whose vagina Sarsour wants to confiscate, calls her a “fake feminist.” Brigitte Gabriel, the other woman, calls Sarsour a “master manipulator” successfully swaying “the gullible women’s movement.”

Ariel Behar of IPT News wrote that Sarsour specializes in trying “to shut down those who cite her record of celebrating terrorists and advocating radical positions by calling the critics Islamophobes.” Sarsour is also a conspiracy theorist, endorsing, for instance, the bizarre view that failed “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was “a CIA agent.”

Sarsour’s defenders claim that her views stem from anger and “should come as no surprise for a Palestinian-American;” after all what she really opposes is “right-wing Zionism.” Sarsour has said that Zionists – including the vast majority of Jews – can’t be feminists. She didn’t say only “right-wing Zionists” can’t be feminists.

Why would the CUNY want to showcase someone who, as Daniel Pipes documents, has such a “long record of incompetence, extremism, vulgarity, and eccentricity”? Dov Hikind, a Brooklyn Democrat in the New York Assembly, says “it’s just nuts. It makes no sense. It’s crazy to have this woman be the person who’s going to speak to the students.”

In an effort to explain, CUNY Chancellor James B. Millikin released an April 26 statement saying that while the views Sarsour “reportedly” has on Israel are “anathema to the values of higher education,” forgoing a commencement speech by Sarsour “would conflict with the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom.”

But these arguments conflate and grossly misunderstand free speech and academic freedom.Which speakers a university, even a public one, invites to deliver commencement speeches is not a First Amendment issue. This is not a matter of deciding whether to allow this or that student demonstration or campus guest lecture to take place; it’s a formal endorsement, not of what the speaker says, but of the speaker’s qualifications and ability to inspire an audience. Of course Sarsour has a First Amendment right to her anti-Zionism and even to her anti-Semitism. But CUNY does not have a First Amendment obligation to honor her or provide a platform for her.

Academic freedom is another thing entirely. Sarsour is not a CUNY faculty member, or even an academic. Even if she were, her academic freedom would only be violated if Millikin tried to influence the content of her teaching.

Those who cite Columbia University’s hosting of a lecture by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a precedent are missing the point entirely. Having a morbid intellectual curiosity perform live for the benefit of scientific observation is one thing. Inviting one to give parting words of advice to your student body is another thing altogether.

If Millikin really found Sarsour’s support for BDS (no need for the qualifier “reportedly”) “anathema to the values of higher education,” as Chancellor, he could have easily overridden her selection. This is what likely happens all the time in nearly every academic institution when someone suggests a conservative speaker be invited.

The problem, most likely, is that Sarsour received far more faculty support than any conservative who ever made it past the first round of nominations at CUNY.

If university administrators want to wilt under pressure and allow this kind of spectacle to take place, they should at least find the courage not to cite the First Amendment and academic freedom as the reasons.

A.J. Caschetta is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

1 Jun 2017Liz WagnerCUNY's promotion of Linda Sarsour is a big step forward in the mainstreaming of Jew-hatred by the left. To me, it is a sign that unless Jews being beaten in the streets in front of them, and even then it may be questionable, liberal American Jews will never raise a peep to challenge the anti-Jewish trajectory the left has been on ever since the Black Power movement normalized Middle Eastern Jew-hatred through its alliance with the PLO. Sure, the ADL managed to come to it senses, momentarily for this, but liberal Jews in NY seem incapable of aggressively standing up for the Jewish people or Israel. They're all about making themselves acceptable to the rest of the left, and they will sacrifice Israel, and themselves, to do it.

3 Jun 2017jewdog I think it's great that CUNY is hosting the ridiculous Linda Sarsour as commencement speaker. Her appearance embodies and publicizes the rot that has been festering for so long in our colleges. Now we see the real significance of all that PC, of white privilege, of safe spaces, of microaggressions, of the obsession with all of the sins of Western civilization: that our revered institutes of higher education are intellectually corrupted and that they need a basic rethink. The campus king has no clothes.

Linda Sarsour and Arab member of Knesset Ibrahim Sarsour are the symptoms of Jewish tolerance for their murderers. Jewish tolerance for their abusers. Both of them use Jewish weakness to their advantage in promoting the basic Islamic jew hatred which negates Jewish humanity, Jewish freedom, Jewish sovereignty, because all three prove Islam is a lie, damn lie, a murderous damn lie.

I fully support Ibrahim Sarsour speaking in the Knesset s loudy as posible. The truth of Jew-hatred mus be heard and exprienced many times to be undestood by a peple with immense tolerance for Evil. As for Sarsour in CUNY, even more so. Jews in Diaspora sould be made aware of how fagilethir life is when not sovereign. When under "protection" of the Goyim. In he fullness of time they will realize there is no alternative to sovereignty and make it back home to their ancestral homeand.